TIGS student Macinley Butson and Bega student Jade Moxey with their portable, self-sustainable water treatment invention. Photo: Martin Butson Two South Coast teens have taken out third place at the world's largest science research competition for school students.

The idea began with a bin of discarded avocado pits. Where others would see waste, Drexel University Food Lab graduate students Sheetal Bahirat and Christa Kwaw-Yankson recognized an opportunity.After some experimenting, they made an avocado-pit tea by blanching, grating and dehydrating the pit. The tea has a mild, slightly fruity taste and a pleasing, natural pink color.

Students at schools across the nation are poised to walk out of their classrooms for 16 minutes Wednesday to show their support for the Second Amendment . The national event, called "Stand for the Second," comes just over a month after students around the country staged a walkout aimed at stopping gun violence and honoring the students killed at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla., in February.

Politics in Canada
On Monday, May 7, a rally and nonviolent direct action will take place on Parliament Hill in solidarity with the Labrador Land Protectors, a group of Indigenous and non-Indigenous people who are trying to stop an act of cultural genocide downstream of the massive Muskrat Falls mega-dam that experts predict will eventually cost $78 billion .
Individuals trained in nonviolence will attempt to walk straight into the House of Commons and place on the desks of all 343 MPs pictures and testimonies from those at risk of methylmercury poisoning as well as mass drowning from a potential catastrophic dam break in Labrador.
The gathering is in response to a call from the Labrador Land Protectors, who write:
"This battle for our very lives can no longer be waged alone. Most of us in Labrador cannot go to Ottawa. We need your voices to help expose the major tragedy unfolding that there is still time to stop. Ensure the federal government sees our faces, hears our voices, and acts on our ...

"What we really have is an education crisis," says Noah Karvelis, an Arizona elementary school teacher who started the group behind today's statewide teachers' walkout. Karvelis explains why teachers are still striking despite promises from the governor for better wages, and how the struggle in Arizona advances the nationwide movement for justly paid teachers and fully funded public schools.
Noah Karvelis speaks during the #RedForEd strike in Arizona, April 25, 2017. (Photo: Arizona Education Association )
Also See: Arizona Educators Stage First Statewide Walkout as Teacher Revolt Grows
Welcome to Interviews for Resistance. We're now more than a year into the Trump administration, and activists have scored some important victories in those months. Yet there is always more to be done, and for many people, the question of where to focus and how to help remains. In this series, we talk with organizers, agitators and educators not only about how to resist but also about how to build a better world. Today's ...

Strikers listen to a speaker during the #RedForEd strike in Arizona, April 25, 2017. (Photo: Arizona Education Association )
Unlike West Virginia and Oklahoma, today's teacher walkout in Arizona is the first statewide strike ever held by educators in the Grand Canyon State. But the state still resembles others revolting this spring because educators there also lack collective bargaining rights under so-called "right-to-work" provisions, and their decision walk out over decades of low pay and cuts to education is technically illegal.
Strikers listen to a speaker during the #RedForEd strike in Arizona, April 25, 2017. (Photo: Arizona Education Association )
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Unlike West Virginia and Oklahoma, today's teacher walkout in Arizona is the first statewide strike ever held by educators in the Grand Canyon State. But the state still resembles others revolting this spring because educators ...

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This article was published by TalkPoverty.org.
At the March for Our Lives in Washington, DC, rays of sunlight break through an unseasonably cold March, through the ordered, brutalist buildings that line Pennsylvania Avenue. Hundreds of thousands of people crowd the avenue, just as they have been crowding legislators' phone lines and email inboxes in recent weeks. On a stage strategically positioned in line with the Capitol building, 17-year-old Cameron Kasky, a Parkland shooting survivor, delivers this proclamation :
To the leaders, skeptics, and cynics who told us to sit down and stay silent, wait your turn: Welcome to the revolution. It is a powerful and peaceful one because it is of, by, and for the young people of this country. Since this movement began some people have asked me, do you think any change is going to come from this? Look around, ...

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Three state senators have sponsored a bill that will allow New York to fast-track the repair of crumbling highway infrastructure -- on the condition that armed police be stationed in every school in New York City, public or private.
Democrat Simcha Felder joined Republicans Martin J. Golden and Andrew J. Lanza to propose Senate Bill S7867 , which has a stated purpose of changing the contracting method for construction on the Bronx-Queens Expressway.
While there are many problems with the design-build method , it has broad support among politicians because it saves money and expedites the repair process.
Stipulating more cops in schools as part of an unrelated highway repair bill is a cynical political maneuver to pass a potentially unpopular measure. In essence, Felder, Golden and Lanza are holding necessary infrastructure repair hostage -- to be traded for the safety ...

Fifty years ago today, on April 23, 1968, hundreds of students at Columbia University in New York started a revolt on campus. They occupied five buildings, including the president's office in Low Library, then students barricaded themselves inside the buildings for days. They were protesting Columbia's ties to military research and plans to build a university gymnasium in a public park in Harlem. The protests began less than three weeks after the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. The 1968 Columbia uprising led to one of the largest mass arrests in New York City history -- more than 700 people arrested on April 30. It also inspired student protests across the country. Today, we spend the hour looking back at this pivotal moment. We are joined by Raymond Brown, former leader of the Student Afro-American Society; Nancy Biberman, a Barnard College student who joined the protests as a member of Students for Democratic Society; Mark Rudd, chair of the Columbia University chapter of SDS during the ...

Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School student, Emma Gonzalez, center, stands next to Naomi Wadler, 11, of Alexandria, Virginia, right, near the conclusion of March for Our Lives on Saturday March 24, 2018, in Washington, DC. (Photo: Matt McClain / The Washington Post via Getty Images)
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During the first week of May 1963, more than 800 African-American students walked out of their classrooms and into the streets of Birmingham, Alabama, to call for an end to segregation. Despite frequent arrests and having dogs and high-pressure firehoses turned on them, they kept marching. Their determination and ceaseless bravery -- later called the Children's Crusade -- was captured in photographs and newspaper articles across the country. Through acts of peaceful and defiant civil disobedience, these students swayed public opinion in support of the civil rights movement.
Fast forward to March 24, ...

Kentucky public school teachers protest outside the Kentucky House Chamber as they rally for a day of action to pressure legislators to override Gov. Matt Bevin's recent veto of the state's tax and budget bills, April 13, 2018, in Frankfort, Kentucky. The teachers also oppose a controversial pension reform bill the governor signed into law. (Photo by Bill Pugliano / Getty Images)
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Teachers in red-state America are hard at work teaching us all a lesson. The American mythos has always rested on a belief that this country was born out of a kind of immaculate conception, that the New World came into being and has forever after been preserved as a land without the class hierarchies and conflicts that so disfigured Europe.
The strikes, rallies, and walkouts of public school teachers in West Virginia, Oklahoma, Kentucky, soon perhaps Arizona, and elsewhere ...

Kentucky Public school teachers protest outside the Kentucky House Chamber as they rally for a 'day of action' at the Kentucky State Capitol to try to pressure legislators to override Kentucky Governor Matt Bevin's recent veto of the state's tax and budget bills April 13, 2018, in Frankfort, Kentucky. (Photo: Bill Pugliano / Getty Images)
KENTUCKY TEACHERS, education workers and their supporters gathered once again on this weekend for rallies at the state Capitol in Frankfort.
The protests represent the continuing urgency of the upsurge that has made Kentucky another site of the teachers' rebellions that swept west from West Virginia through states formerly considered to be conservative "Trump country."
At the same time, the demonstrations highlight some of the dynamics and debates that teachers need to consider for the movement to succeed.
At the start of April, an estimated 12,000 teachers and supporters descended on Frankfort , sparked into rebellion specifically by a disastrous attack on public ...

Donald Trump attends a worship service at the International Church of Las Vegas October 30, 2016, in Las Vegas, Nevada. (Photo: Chip Somodevilla / Getty Images)
A new sociological report reveals how, in addition to the sexist, racist, xenophobic and anti-immigrant sentiments, there was a very strong Christian nationalist element that helped put Trump in the White House. Will those who embrace the narrative of Christian nationalism turn out in strength for the 2018 elections, too?
Donald Trump attends a worship service at the International Church of Las Vegas October 30, 2016, in Las Vegas, Nevada. (Photo: Chip Somodevilla / Getty Images)
With the 2018 midterm elections coming down the pike, many continue to reflect on Trump's victory in 2016, searching for answers about what drove Trump's base to the polls, and wondering whether a similar mobilization is likely to occur this year.
The latest attempt to analyze Trump's rise to the presidency comes from three sociologists who have released a new report ...

A right-wing coalition, which has received funding from both the Koch Brothers and the billionaire Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, is launching an aggressive attack on the tens of thousands of teachers and education supporters who have been demanding increased school funding and teacher salaries in recent weeks.
As the Guardian reports , the State Policy Network (SPN) is distributing a guide to anti-labor activists across the nation, with the aim of helping them to discredit the protests that teachers have been organizing in Oklahoma, Kentucky, West Virginia, and Arizona.
Such demonstrations, SPN argues in the guide, "hurt kids and low-income families" because they keep students out of schools and can force parents to miss work.
Even the right-wing editorial board of the Washington Post recognizes that it is Republican governments slashing education funding -- not striking teachers -- that is harming to students in the long run.
"What the teachers are protesting also hurts children -- that is, a ...